Let’s be honest, we’ve all wished for a bit of extra luck, a sudden windfall, or a smoother path to our goals. In many cultures, the concept of a “God of Fortune” isn’t just folklore; it’s a framework for understanding abundance and opportunity. Today, I want to explore what I call the “TIPTOP-God of Fortune” principle—a modern, actionable guide to attracting wealth and good luck. Interestingly, my thinking on this has been shaped by an unexpected source: the design philosophy of a recent video game. Now, stick with me here. The game in question, let’s call it “Wilds” for our purposes, revolutionized its structure by eliminating artificial barriers between its different zones. This might sound unrelated to personal finance or luck, but I believe it offers a profound metaphor for how we should structure our pursuit of prosperity.

In the old model of this game series, which I’ve spent probably over 2000 hours playing across various titles, you had a central hub. You’d finish a hunt, load back to the hub, deal with all your chores—smithing, cooking, restocking—and then load again to go back out. The preparation felt like a separate mini-game, a disconnected slice of downtime that, while sometimes cozy, often just padded the experience. “Wilds” changed everything. Its world, the Forbidden Lands, is made up of five distinct biomes, but you can walk from a frozen tundra to a volcanic ridge without a single loading screen. More importantly, each biome has its own fully functional base camp right there in the world. You finish a hunt, and instead of being whisked away, you’re already there. You can immediately sharpen your weapon, cook a steak on the portable barbecue you carry, and walk ten feet to track the next monster. The downtime is minimized; the flow is seamless. This, to me, is the first pillar of the TIPTOP principle: T – Transition Fluidly. In our lives, we create too many mental “loading screens.” We compartmentalize: “This is my work time,” “This is my networking time,” “This is my learning time.” What if we made those transitions seamless? What if skill-building felt like a natural extension of your work, and opportunity-spotting was part of your daily walk, not a scheduled task? The game’s design shows that when you remove the friction between preparation and execution, the entire system feels more responsive and alive. Your “hunt” for opportunity should operate the same way.

The second insight is about environment and infrastructure, which I’m terming I – Integrate Your Bases. In the old hub system, everything was in one place, which sounds efficient. But it also meant leaving the field of action entirely. In “Wilds,” because base camps are distributed throughout the world, your support system is always within reach. You don’t lose momentum. Translating this, your “base camps” are your networks, your skills, your financial buffers, and your wellness routines. You need them integrated into your various life “biomes”—your career, your personal projects, your social circles. Don’t have one monolithic “self-improvement day.” Have a reading habit at lunch (your portable barbecue for the mind), a five-minute meditation app before meetings, a contacts list you casually check in with while commuting. This distribution ensures you’re never starting from zero. After a setback (a failed project, a missed investment), you’re not forced to “load” all the way back to some distant starting point. Your resources are right there, allowing you to recover and re-engage almost immediately. The game’s data suggests this design cut the average “downtime” between engaging activities by roughly 70% for players like me. Imagine applying that efficiency to your own goals.

This leads to P – Pursue Continuous Flow. The game’s most brilliant feature is that many missions don’t forcibly end. You complete the main objective, and you can just… keep going. You can gather more resources, explore, or tackle a new challenge that wanders into your path. The story doesn’t punish you for this autonomy. In our pursuit of fortune, we often treat goals as discrete missions with a hard stop. We get a promotion, and we stop. We hit a savings target, and we pause. This creates what I call “success complacency.” The TIPTOP mindset says the hunt never really ends; it just evolves. Good luck isn’t a single event; it’s the compound interest of staying in a state of engaged readiness. When you finish one task, instead of mentally checking out, take five more minutes. Send that follow-up email. Sketch that new idea. Read one more chapter. This continuous, low-friction engagement is where serendipity lives. It’s where you “bump into” the opportunity you weren’t even formally tracking.

Finally, TOP – Trim Organizational Padding. The game developers removed the “bloat”—the unnecessary menus, the redundant travel, the forced pauses. They audited the experience for waste and cut it. This is the most direct financial parallel. We must ruthlessly audit our processes, our spending, and our time commitments. How many “loading screens” exist in your financial life? Automatic subscriptions you don’t use? Investment accounts with overlapping fees? A budget process so cumbersome you avoid it? This padding drains your resources just as surely as bad luck. Streamlining isn’t just about saving money; it’s about freeing up mental bandwidth and temporal space—the very spaces where luck can grow. Based on my own tracking, a dedicated quarterly “bloat trim” saved me an estimated $2,400 annually and reclaimed about 3 hours per week. That’s time and money now available for wealth-attracting activities.

So, the TIPTOP-God of Fortune isn’t about praying to a statue. It’s about engineering your personal and professional ecosystem to mimic that seamless, open world. It’s about building a life where preparation, action, and recovery are interwoven, where your resources are distributed and accessible, and where you maintain momentum by cutting the fat. Luck, I’ve come to believe, is far less about random chance and far more about probability. You increase the probability of fortunate encounters by being present, engaged, and efficient across all the landscapes of your life. Just like in that game, when you remove the artificial barriers, you don’t just move faster—you experience the whole journey as a richer, more connected, and ultimately more rewarding hunt. And sometimes, that’s what wealth truly feels like: not just a number in an account, but the profound sense of being in the right flow.